Splitting a Track into parts and Exporting Multiple Tracks

I am on Mac Ventura and have had to update Audacity from a much older version I was using (2.3.0.0). The reason I had kept hold of this old version was because of a change that I never liked and never understood.

In the old version in order to split a long track into shorter tracks you would just use the SPLIT NEW function and then EXPORT MULTIPLE to export the individual tracks.

In newer version of Audacity it you split a single track into two in this way then the first exported track is fine, but the second exported track is still the same length as the whole original track but has a long silence equal to the length of the first split off track.

A further example, if you were splitting an original track of 5 minutes duration into three tracks of 1minute, 2.5minutes and 1.5minutes duration, you would end up with the first exported track being the correct 1 minute duration, the second track would be 3.5 minutes duration with the start of the track being 1 minute of silence, and the third track would be 5 minuted duration with the start of the track being 3.5 minutes of silence.

The only way round this appears to be to realign all new tracks to ZERO before exporting. And it seems to align multiple tracks to ZERO you have to first SELECT => SELECT ALL, then TRACKS => ALIGN TRACKS => ALIGN TRACKS TOGETHER then ALIGN TRACKS => ALIGN TRACKS TO ZERO. Alternatively you would have to align them all individually. This all seems very unwieldy compared to Audacity’s previous incarnation. Is this the way the current Audacity is meant to work?

  1. go to Import /Export Preferences
  2. check “on” Ignore blank space at the beginning - this is “off” by default

See: Import / Export Preferences - Audacity Manual

Note that this is likely to change for the upcoming 3.4.0 release as the Export dialog is likely to be changing to give more options/more control at export time.

Peter.

Thank you for your fast response. I knew there must be a way of doing it somehow, I just couldn’t find it. I didn’t think that it might be hidden in preferences somewhere. Cheers.

In a later release maybe 3.4.0 (but it’s not quite ready yet so may slip to alter release) the options will all be visible in the export dialog itself - including one that will say Trim blank space before first clip

Peter.

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